Portrait of a Happy Man

I was asked to do some publicity photos of Jouko Harjanne, a world class trumpet soloist. He has got some studio photos before (not by me), and as the existing photos were too serious he now wanted to see something different, lighter and 'with a twist'. Being too serious really is against his personality, he's always telling jokes and being generally a very happy and positive person. This idea of shooting from upwards occurred to me for two reasons: the first was that I know that for brochures and net pages it's hard to fit the whole person with the instrument, and the other reason was that I don't have a studio, but what I do have is a 3.5m high apartment with a loft which is about 2m high. So, I sat on the loft and put Jouko on a white sheet which was there only for helping the post-production part (masking) as I don't have a studio with large papers and textures. This was the first shot I took from up there. I loaded the photo into Photoshop 6.01 and masked Jouko away, and created the background shadow using a mask from other shot, some color fiddling and with some Gaussian blur.